If you want to accelerate the testing of your BI solutions, the best strategy is the automation of your tests with the help of a dedicated framework. During this session, we’ll take a look to the features of the open-source framework named “NBi” (www.nbi.io). This framework is providing support for automated tests on the fields of databases, cubes, reports and ETLs, without the need of .Net skills. The demos will show us the best approaches to quickly and effectively assert the quality of BI developments. We'll go a step further, generating the tests by an interesting system of templates and test-cases sources.

Mark Primary

SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) is Microsoft developer tools for working with SQL Server databases on premises and in the cloud. It supersedes Management Studio in development functionality. Team Foundation Server (TFS) is the collaboration platform at the core of Microsoft’s application lifecycle management (ALM) solution. TFS gives you the tools you need to effectively manage software development projects throughout the IT lifecycle. In this session, we are going to focus on the interaction between SSDT and TFS. Developing locally and publishing the changes to an on-premises instance of SQL Server. We will look at how we can do continuous integration between development and other environments pushing the schema changes and upgrading the version numbers in a seamless manner upon successful build of the solution. Furthermore we'll look at how to lift the integration to an even greater level by using Microsoft Release Management thus automating the deployment and testing of your software.

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Mark Primary

If you ask an expert about using a clustered index you will ALWAYS hear: Yes, you need a clustered index for your table. Last but not least Microsoft Azure Databases requires clustered indexes. But clustered indexes are not always a good choice for your database solution because of several different reasons. This session will start a debate about genius and madness of clustered indexes in your application.
This session will run several demos which will show in a very clear way why a clustered index isn't the best choice in several workload scenarios. "There's no lunch for free"! Not using clustered indexes will have ONE heavy drawback - this drawback will be demonstrated, too.
The session goal is to make decisions easier for you to use a clustered index or not!

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Mark Primary

We all know that ‘Indexing’ is KING when it comes to achieving high levels of performance in SQL Server.
When Indexing also combines 2 of the Enterprise features: Partitioning & Compression, we can often see substantial gains.
Learn how to identify those objects that benefit greatly from being Partitioned or Compressed, OR combining both of these features to even greater effect.
Using Demos to illustrate the performance gains with real-world examples, Take away advanced scripts for use in your own environments.

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Mark Primary

SQL Server 2014 is full of new features and improvements. Some of them are "Killer" features like InMemory OLTP, Clustered Columnstore Indexes, Buffer Pool Extensions, etc., which are discussed a lot and we always can get a lot of information about them. And in the same time, SQL Server 2014 have several fantastic features and improvements, which are more hidden from our sight.
In this session, we will learn a lot about these features and improvements. Query Fingerprints, Cardinality Estimator, Tempdb improvements, and other overshadowed features will be covered in this session.
As a small bonus, we will talk a bit how these features are improved in SQL Server 2016.

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Mark Primary

R is the world's most widely-used programming language for data analysis. SQL Server is say to be the most popular (or at least the fastest growing) DB engine. Guess, how popular MRS (Microsoft R Server) is going to be…
In this demo heavy session Marcin Szeliga will introduce you to the fundamentals of Microsoft R Server, it’s native file format XDF (eXternal Data Frame), data manipulation functions, and machine learning algorithms.
Don’t miss the opportunity to see how MSR addresses open source R scalability and performance issues.

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Mark Primary

Learning SQL is easy, mastering it is hard. In this session you’ll learn simple but effective tricks to design your database objects better and write more optimized code. As an attendee you will gain a deeper understanding of common database development and administration mistakes, and how you can avoid them.
Ever thought that you were adhering to best practices but still seeing performance problems? You might well be. In this session I will be covering why the optimizer isn’t using all available processors, when the database engine fails to report all the resources a query has used and why the optimizer doesn’t always use the best plan.
You will leave this session with a list of things that you can check for in your environment to improve performance for your users.

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Mark Primary

How easy is it to hack a SQL Server?
In this session we'll see a few examples on how to exploit SQL Server, modify data and take control, while at the same time not leaving a trace.
We'll start by gaining access to a SQL Server (using some "creative" ways of making man-in-the-middle attacks), escalating privileges and tampering with data at the TDS protocol level (e.g. changing your income level and reverting without a trace after payment), and more.
Most importantly, we'll also cover recommendations on how to avoid these attacks, and take a look at the pros and cons of new security features in SQL Server 2016.
This is a demo-driven session, suited for DBAs, developers and security consultants (Jedi level).
Disclaimer: No actual state secrets will be revealed. Please do not send agents to my house again.

Mark Primary

We'll walk through how to detect and repair corruption in a database.
The DBCC command is the most important part and its output will be covered.
The different methods to repair the pages gives different amounts of data loss, so we'll go through some of your options such as page level restore, DBCC repair options and some other options.
Finally you'll learn to estimate how much data loss you can expect. We'll even going to see how to look at the corrupt page with DBCC PAGE to try to see approximately what data we are going to loose.

Mark Primary

Why Upgrade?
Data Platform Upgrade topic has been a popular session that I've presented in major conferences like Microsoft Tech-Ed (North America, Europe & India) and SQLbits since 2008.
In this session, we will overview in depth end-to-end upgrade process that covers the essential phases, steps and issues involved in upgrading SQL Server (2000 to 2012), SQL Server 2014 (with a good overview on 2016 too) by using best practices and available resources.
What to-do and what not-to-do?
A popular session that I have been presenting since the year 2008, in MS Tech-Ed, SQL Saturday & SQLbits UK.
We will cover the complete upgrade cycle, including the preparation tasks, upgrade tasks, and post-upgrade tasks. Real-world examples from my Consulting experience expanding on why & how such a solution.

Mark Primary

Fully additive measures and simple x minus y plus z formulas exist only in simple cubes. Business requirements are growing at very high rate. Complicated calculations with many conditions are needed - for months divide by 30, for quarters by 90, for years by...no... for years display nothing etc. And what about what-if analysis, simulations? The solution is only one. You must become an MDX Hero and dive deeply into multidimensional space of your cube. In my session I will present some real life analytical examples utilizing the SCOPE instruction - a truly hyperdrive for SSAS developer.

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Mark Primary

You have probably heard something about switching between FULL and BULK LOGGED recovery models and that it's useful for minimally logged operations. But what exactly are these operations? How can you benefit from them and what conditions have to be met? Are there any downsides?
If you want to speed up data loading you should get familiar with minimal logging. In this sessiion I will show you real life examples (and - well - some not real life) how useful can it be, what downsides it has and how it changed over the SQL Server versions.

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Mark Primary

The presentation covers recoverability options in SQL Server over time. It will take us through many different ways of recovering a large 1TB+ database. It will also walk us through many different options for creating development/test/uat environments. It will highlight the benefits and shortcomings of these options while delivering a business value of each. It will also evaluate a high level ROI of each of these options.
Finally, the presentation will focus on an architecture based on SAN technologies with respect to SQL Server. I will demonstrate an architecture put in place resolving many business needs in a financial trading environment, working with large data sets and many different environments. This section will highlight the benefits of using SQL Server together with newer SAN solutions and show the potential for reliability, scalability, and the delivery of a high quality HA/DR solution. That is where things get interesting...

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Mark Primary

Nowadays (or in near future), when building data warehousing solutions we have to reach data saved on Hadoop nodes. With SQL Server 2016 you can do that leaving Hive, Pig and other animals behind and focus on your current skills. This session, fully packed with demos, will be focused mainly on new SSIS components keeping conversation with our Hadoop servers. I promise, your BI developer life will be easier from now on.

Mark Primary

There are some business users wanting the information to be available at hand, wherever they are. A good example is a board member tracking profitability of his/her company on a favourite iPhone. Microsoft Data Platform allows BI developers to build reports and dashboards that can be delivered to the most popular mobile devices in the world (iPhone, iPad, Android devices, Windows devices). The purpose of this session will be to show up the capabilities (but also some caveats) of mobile reporting solutions built with SQL Server 2016 Reporting Services (ex-Datazen) and Power BI.

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Mark Primary

SQL Server 2016 comes up with a very exciting feature called Temporal tables. You can make queries to historical data lot easier by using this feature. The mechanism is very simple however you all should know it in depth to make sure you can use it efficiently. And this is exactly what I am going to do during this session – show you how to create temporal tables, how to use and manage them